Earlier quoted context omitted.
I need to dig out the link, but there is a Study from Finland that shows this is incorrect: As housing stock quality improves, everyone upgrades. Which leaves room at the bottom level to get on the ladder into lower quality cheaper housing. Also supply and demand: if prices are increasing it is mostly because supply is not keeping up with demand. Lastly, like all other products in a market, we should see a general im…
I'd be interested in that study, because that doesn't match what I'm seeing on coastal US cities. https://youtu.be/uuCuTThT_Tw
I will do anything to end homelessness except build more homes (2018)
221–230 of 452 posts
Re: I will do anything to end homelessness except build more homes (2018)
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
Luckily, your personal thoughts from first principles with zero review of the available data is not all we have to go on! There is research[0] about causes of homelessness and about the effect[1] of house building on homelessness. This is a well-studied issue, that, as the linked article likes to point out, people are just opposed to the solution for reasons of personal interest and (to me, bizzare) bias. Building ho…
Eh, I'm not against building more homes though. I just think biasing towards social housing is better than building homes in general.
The point of that second link above is that any amount of housing, at any price point, lowers cost of housing for everyone, especially lower-income participants in the market.
Housing is in such brutally short supply (goes for major cities in North America as well as Europe) that not only can we not afford to be picky, but in terms of actual effect it doesn't matter: social housing is as effective as luxury housing. Sometimes it is _less_ effective at achieving social goals, if rich people are also trying to get their hands on the same housing stock, because there is not enough to meet demand at the top end of the market.
I think people misunderstand the state of the housing market: it is brutally expensive because of chronic, decades long undersupply, not building enough to meet _new_ demand each year, thus the "debt" in supply has compounded massively. This has strong and weird market effects, such that building lots of cheap housing at huge scale is only a partial solution (and the scale actually needed to alleviate the problem is much larger than anyone is actually willing to contemplate right now).
Re: I will do anything to end homelessness except build more homes (2018)
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not even sure it's entirely a matter of being blocked from doing so as much as the incentives merely not being there. What is the incentive for a developer to build affordable housing? The margins are surely much lower. The city could set rent restrictions on new development and all that, but that removes the incentive for developers to actually build in that area at all, especially when they can just find an unr…
>What is the incentive for a developer to build affordable housing? The margins are surely much lower. This makes sense to me, and I hear it all the time, but when was it ever in a builder's interest to make affordable housing? Why does this perverse incentive seem like a recent thing?
My wild guess would be urban renewal grants and drastically lower land costs made it easier to recoup investments. I'm sure that's only part of the equation though. Part of it is probably also just the realization they could be making more money.
Re: I will do anything to end homelessness except build more homes (2018)
#224I think anyone who has actually been hands on trying to improve the lives of the unhomed know that 1) it’s a gradient between “I get kicked out of x everyday and go back at night” and “I’m sleeping under a bridge” and 2) rarely is it the actual cost of the home that’s the problem. Often it’s mental health / substance abuse / lack of a support system. Heck I think there is enough movies/shows about how people fall thr…
Putting in a plug for a great book called Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. https://www.amazon.com/Another-Bullshit-Night-Suck-City/dp/0... This is the book that humanized homelessness for me. I better understand how it can happen to just about anyone, the vicious cycles involved, and how it affects observers on a deep level. For the record, I found the article pretty annoying as well. Overwrought and vague. The b…
The concept of humanizing homelessness fascinates me. It really does seem that the cultural default in the US is to view homeless people as subhumans who deserve to lead miserable lives. I’m not saying that this is what you yourself consciously believe(d), but it seems to be the implicit belief underlying much of the discourse around homelessness on HN and in the US more broadly.
Normally when we talk about “humanizing” a problem it’s one that doesn’t have a directly visible human element. But everyone has seen actual homeless people. It’s not something that we are just aware of as an abstract problem.
What exactly is the cultural barrier to seeing what ought to be very obvious? I.e. that homeless people are regular people who are down on their luck, or who are victims of broader societal failings.
Re: I will do anything to end homelessness except build more homes (2018)
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Marijuana usage is now in the mainstream. You might as well ask how to prevent your property from smelling like cigarette smoke.
I can go weeks without smelling cigarettes or seeing someone smoking a cigarette.
But every fucking day marijuana. Every public park; marijuana. Sports events; marijuana. Just sitting in traffic; marijuana. Waiting in fucking line at my kids' after-school pickup, marijuana.
It's a little ridiculous at this point.
I am a huge proponent of legalized marijuana, but for real. The people that do this are ruining it for the rest of us. Luckily it makes SO MUCH MONEY that I don't think we'll ever see it outlawed again, but. This is exactly what the pearl-clutching anti-pot people said would happen.
Re: I will do anything to end homelessness except build more homes (2018)
#226I think anyone who has actually been hands on trying to improve the lives of the unhomed know that 1) it’s a gradient between “I get kicked out of x everyday and go back at night” and “I’m sleeping under a bridge” and 2) rarely is it the actual cost of the home that’s the problem. Often it’s mental health / substance abuse / lack of a support system. Heck I think there is enough movies/shows about how people fall thr…
I see this take a lot but it's a very static take on homelessness. Yes, homeless people are often in a mental state where they are difficult to take care of. However, that doesn't mean they're homeless because they're mentally unstable. Often, the reason they are unstable is because they are homeless. Being on the street heavily exacerbates drug and mental health issues. Plenty of homeless people start out normal and…
bko in the sibling comment said nearly exactly what I was going to say. While I do agree that you can "fall into" this start and it's very difficult to get out of - I'm very skeptical that with no other contributing preexisting factors you wouldn't be able to figure something out. You'd have to be extremely unlikely to
- not have any family
- not have any friends
- not have any savings
- not have anything they could sell
- not have any ability to do even temp work (IE, had some traumatic debilitating accident)
- Not being able to move somewhere that's cheaper
- Not being able to take advantage of any social programs (I'm canadian, it's pretty easy for example to get a large portion of your school paid by the government)
And if _all_ of this was true, other than potentially avoiding the impacts of being homeless - how would being given a place to live (especially in a High cost of living area) fix any of your other pretty serious issues?
Re: I will do anything to end homelessness except build more homes (2018)
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having actually built, planned, and done all the paperwork for a house myself most the extra costs that can't be worked around (you can DIY everything if you want) is permitting, inspection, and codes. I just didn't get my house inspected nor did I submit engineered plans, so saved tons of money, but most people don't have the option to bypass 'safety' inspections and they get gutted like a pig following all those ru…
They may be desperate to hire anybody, but not everyone is willing, with good reason, to work 16 hour days with no overtime pay and sub-minimum wage no benefits and work for only part of the year and get paid under the table. only reason it make since for migrants is the low cost/standard of living back home and currency arbitrage where us dollar are worth so much more than their own currency.
You can enter Mexico, and they have only checked I had paperwork/passport about one times of ten. No reason why you can't do the same thing if you want to do currency arbitrage. Paraguay will give you a residence permit pretty much just for showing up if you can get ahold of a USA passport, or you can avail yourself of the compact of free association and live in Micronesia without a visa. The arbitrage game is for everybody.
Re: I will do anything to end homelessness except build more homes (2018)
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
You think mentally ill do not need a place to shower and sleep safely? And what do you think the lack of place to shower and sleep safely does with already mentally ill person? Like common, this does not passes the smell test. When housing is cheap, mentally ill can pay housing and have easier time getting support to get that housing. Their mental health issue do not escalate so quickly due to lack of sleep and const…
> You think mentally ill do not need a place to shower and sleep safely? Giving a locking door to an addict is a death sentence. As countless experiments have proven, unsupervised shelters all over California have been literally destroyed by addicts and the mentally unwell. I'm talking faeces on the walls, blood and urine everywhere, horrific attacks in the units, and eventually the place just gets burnt down. So the…
It's almost like there needs to be something between locking them up against their will, and just ignoring them entirely.
Weird.
Re: I will do anything to end homelessness except build more homes (2018)
#229There’s a disturbing trend of people living im their car who have a job or more and who aren’t doing drugs or have a serious mental ilness aside from the anxiety from the lifestyle of living in their cars. Youtube is full of interviews of these people.
Re: I will do anything to end homelessness except build more homes (2018)
#230My country has enough homes (in principle, and there is pressure on the system), but we still have homeless people. Maybe in the US it is about building houses, but at some point it isn't anymore. I once wrote this here: [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25903859
There should always be a surplus of homes, the point is to get a sufficient surplus in the places that are in demand that this places downward pressure on prices, aka competition.
One question would be how could we create any incentive for someone to build a home in an area that's currently in equilibrium?
Starting a new home construction in a location with falling housing prices isn't an obviously winning business strategy.